Big weekend release 'Watchmen' ticks off critics

By Sarah Sluis

The only wide opening this weekend, everyone is going to be watching the Watchmen on one of the 3,611 screens in its release. Zack Snyder's adaptation of the epic comic book recently outsold the advance

tickets purchased for 300, the film whose $70.9 million opening weekend set a March record While the movie will certainly open big, and has the saturation press coverage to support its debut, people who have actually seen the movie have surprisingly uniform complaints.

First and foremost, it's all surface area and no depth. It tries to cover everything but can't spend enough time with a scene to allow us to get emotionally invested in the narrative or characters. Various ways this can be said include:

"Ironically, the problem with the screenplay isn't that the writers leave too much out�it's that they cram too much in."--Ethan Alter, FJI
"[To] a mid-80s college softmore...the dense involution of the narrative might have seemed exhilarating rather than exhausting." --A.O. Scott, NY Times
"Yet even Watchmen fanatics may be doomed to a disappointment that results from trying to stay this faithful to a comic book...He doesn't move the camera or let the scenes breathe. He crams the film with bits and pieces, trapping his actors like bugs wriggling in the frame."--Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

Almost as universal as the cry that Snyder has tried to include too much, is the feeling that the film is too long. I actually feel that if Snyder "let the scenes breathe," as Gleiberman advised, Watchmen would have felt shorter. With a two-hour, forty-minute running time, we end up pondering over the previous scene as the next is already halfway over, pulling us further out of the story. My screening audience was fairly fidgety, especially during the film's last legs. The Blackberry-checking was ever-present, but I like to think the presence of light pollution (my pet peeve) is more related to the manners of those sitting next to me than the actual quality of the film.

A.O. Scott, echoing the complaints of many, also finds the film's 1980s Cold War nihilism an artifact, no longer a part of the cultural zeitgeist. Perhaps this is true for those who lived through those years, but

the 18-25s who were Eighties babies and think that the excessive graffiti is set design, not an actual reflection of reality, don't fall in that category. Sure, the social commentary is more suited to a period twenty years ago, but that doesn't make it less interesting...as a historical artifact.

One last problem I had was the utter obviousness of the musical choices. These were songs straight out of Forrest Gump, the go-to songs of a generation, and just another example of the lack of depth and overstuffed nature of the film. Even A.O. Scott devoted a few words to a particularly overused musical choice, Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah:"

"(By the way, can we please have a moratorium on the use of this song in movies? Yes, I too have heard there was a secret chord that David played, and blah blah blah, but I don't want to hear it again. Do you?)"

On that note, I'd like to add that the Jeff Buckley version of this song appeared on literally every teen soap opera a couple years ago, sapping the song of any claim to novelty. Along with "Hallelujah" there's Dylan's "The Times, They Are A-Changin,'" "The Sound of Silence," and "99 Luftballoons." Ironic use of "Unforgettable" by Nat "King" Cole? Check. These are songs we have heard again and again, and signs of a huge musical budget blown by hitting only the most obvious notes.

My conclusion: Watchmen will open big, but it will be a huge embarrassment if it doesn't break 300's opening. After opening weekend, word-of-mouth can't be good on this thing. People will see it to see it, but they're not going to be bugging their friends to see it too, and they're not going to go back more than once.

Co-creator of Watchmen Alan Moore took his name off the film, wanting no money, no credit, nothing to do with a project he dubbed "unfilmable." Like his character the Comedian, he's having the last laugh.